I collect manuals. I have so many of them, that I'm starting to wonder where on earth I'm supposed to put them all. Somewhere in the back of a closet, I keep all my manuals in three huge boxes, with manuals dating from the early '80s to just a few days ago when I bought a new mouse. However, none of them are as dear to my as my extensive, fully illustrated Dutch manuals for Windows 3.0, which accompanied my parents' first PC in 1990. An enormously detailed manual covering every aspect of Windows 3.0 - with special sleeves for the various floppy disks that held the Windows 3.0 operating system. I still have those original floppies, and they're still fully functional. Last week, the era of Windows 3.x finally came to an end when Microsoft ceased to give out licenses for the operating system.

Especially GeoWorks Ensemble was very straight forward at its time, ran much faster than "Windows" on those days' machines, and had GUI functionalities even today's "Windows" lacks, such as detachable menues and an appealing Motif GUI. Sadly, there weren't much additional programs for it, but without wanting to go too far, you could use it even today for everyday simple work (e. g. text processing). Of course, the Web wasn't a topic at this time, so it would be stupid to expect something in this direction.

DESQview/X introduced usable multitasking to DOS, as far as I remember; my DOS era didn't last for very long because I had the chance to quickly turn towards UNIX. Allthough there was DOS/ES on the mainframe... :-)

(BTW, I had the german 1.3 version of GWE that looked much better. I still have a 486 laptop running it that I sometimes use to program Motorola mobile radios - because you can't do that with today's PCs.)

Addition: GeoWorks allowed you to use filenames longer than 8.3 without breaking any compatibility.

DESQview/X introduced usable multitasking to DOS, as far as I remember

I've never used it, but from what I can tell, it lost to Win3x because the latter was much cheaper. Anyways, don't forget DR-DOS 7, which had true multitasking also. Win3x (on my old 486) was never very good at multitasking, but probably because machines of that era had too low RAM (e.g. my 8 MB). DOS' biggest advantage is probably lighter resources than pretty much anything else. Then again, a lot of DOS apps (or apps in general) aren't nearly as efficient as they could be.

In Germany, DR-DOS was called "Doktor DOS" (Dr. is the abbreviation for Doktor). On some humoristic computer site I read that somewhere in the US "Miss DOS" and "Miss Backup" were invented by some smart user. :-)

Win3x (on my old 486) was never very good at multitasking, but probably because machines of that era had too low RAM (e.g. my 8 MB).

The interrupt occupation of some hardware operations were reasons, too. Just try to format a disk and do something else in parallel. The formatting process would slow down or stop, or the other program would stop. The same thing could be observed when copying files from / to a floppy. Strange, but I never had such observations with OS/2...